Weekly Report: Week 16ish

So I'm counting all we've done since my last weekly report as about one week's worth.  After about the 12th of December, I pretty much checked out and didn't want to do schooly stuff.  Hubby was studying very, very hard for finals and I was getting ready for Christmas and it just didn't really happen.  We did enough between then and now that I'm happy to call it another weeks worth.  We even finished reading A Christmas Carol together as a family.  Here's some pictures of our Christmas:

Lydia and Ellie in their Christmas Eve PJs

Adelaide sitting on Santa's lap.

Lydia playing Rock Band with Grandma

Adelaide and Eleanor watching it snow

Lydia and Ellie playing in the snow

Making Christmas candies with Grandma and Aunt Hannah

And that's only one side of the family.  We spent quite a bit of time with the other side too, I just don't have pictures of those yet.  We even took family pictures that I might be sharing later, depending on how they turn out.

I'm getting excited about the upcoming year.  I'm going to make a few little changes here and there, but I'll talk more about that later.  In the meantime, we're going to enjoy the rest of our week with Daddy home before we get back in the swing of things.

Weekly Report: Week 15

This report is a little late, but I wanted to get it down before I forgot what we did.  We had a full week, and aside from a doctor appointment that took all afternoon on Friday and Adelaide's suffering from teething, our week was pretty much the same as usual.

Math:
Lydia is solidly into addition within 10 right now.  She seems to have a very basic understanding of what is going on, so she's continuing to work in both EM (pages 40-47) and Miquon focusing on it.  She can do an addition problem by herself using c-rods.  She's really loving math right now.

Reading:
She's been struggling with beginning blends and words that end with "s", so I've decided to pause and spend the next while on reviewing and solidifying what she's learned up until now.  This is a good point to pause because she's almost done with all her basic blending skills and I don't want anything to get in her way when things start getting more complicated.  We're using a combination of iPad apps and Reading Bear to accomplish this right now, although we might go back and re-read some sections of OPGTR.  I think I won't worry about progressing forward until after Christmas though.

We have also started a family read aloud (Daddy included!).  A few times since we got married, Tyler and I have read A Christmas Carol together around Christmas time.  This year we wanted to include the girls, so we bought this version with beautiful illustrations and are reading it in place of a bed time story nightly.  Lydia seems to like it and asks if we are going to read "Scrooge" again, so it is a success so far.

Weekly Report: Week 14

We ended up taking Thanksgiving week off.  I wasn't in the mood to do school and our schedule was all messed up.  We had a great Thanksgiving at my in-law's house and got back in the swing of things this week, doing a full week's worth of schoolwork!

Doing one of her Winnie the Pooh puzzles

On Monday night for Family Night, we made apple-cinnamon ornaments for our tree.  We used this recipe.  I remember making one of these when I was about 8 years old at a church activity and that ornament smelled so good for years.  Since we had to keep all our breakable ornaments off our tree this year because of all the little ones, we thought this would be a fun activity for our poor little tree.

Making cinnamon ornament

Math:
This week we focused on number bonds.  Number bonds are basically just addition, but they are presented in such a way that they attempt to help the child understand that 10 is just made up of 4 and 6 or that 7 is made up of 2 and 2 and 3.  Lydia loved number bonds.  Every day this week, when we started math, she'd tell me, "number bonds are [my] favorite."  Because she enjoyed it so much, we got a lot done.  She did pages 28-39 in Essential Math B.  In the workbook, it shows pictures of things to represent the numbers, but for every problem, we also did number bonds with the c-rods and for a few problems we used our regular linking cubes as well.  This isn't the first time this concept will be demonstrated to her like this, so I'm not expecting mastery, but she seems to like it and mostly understand what is going on.


In Miquon, we "made" numbers.  The worksheets had a number at the top, say 7 and all the addition problems were trying to figure out how to make 7s.  Because these were very similar to number bonds (but technically super simple algebra), we did several of them for different numbers and then today started actual addition problems!  I see a lot of practice in our future, but she seems to be starting to grasp it all.

Reading:
Lydia finished lesson 49 of OPGTR, so she'll start 50 next time we sit down.  She seems to be really understanding all that we have done so far.  She can now read words like "gifts" and "stuff." I'm afraid because in a few lessons (lesson 54) she'll start digraphs and I think they will be considerably more challenging.  I do she'll be up to the task, though.  And she's already exceeding my expectations for her for this year.  I was originally just going to be happy if she started to understand blending, and now it is looking like she will be reading on a first grade level or so by the end of the year!

Wearing their matching hoodies while playing with playdough.

Other:
We're still working on memorization.  She is working hard on Proverbs 3:5-6 still, and I think she'll get it soon, maybe by the end of next week.  We've stopped listening to Debussy because we're listening to Christmas music instead.  This will be the first year the girls will really be excited about Christmas, so my goal is to help them understand the cultural aspects as they are fairly concrete.  Christmas tree, Santa, Christmas songs, very basic Nativity story, etc.  So far they are having a lot of fun with it and one of their favorite parts so far has been the Charlie Brown Christmas special.